Computerized clinical guidelines and pathways are becoming important tools for care providers when providing patient care and ensuring quality of care. Guidelines define the usually disease-specific clinical state-of-the-art for patient management, whereas pathways track individual patients through the multitude of available management options offered by the guidelines. Both guidelines and pathways are becoming part of hospital-wide information management systems and electronic medical records to ensure that disease and patient management follow evidence-based practice and adhere to quality standards. With growing complexity and penetration of clinical practice, the amount of information handled by these systems is growing rapidly. Intelligent means supporting user-oriented display and navigation of these data sets become more important, especially in view of the workload and time constraints under which clinical personnel make use of such systems.
Conventional flow-chart-like visual representations of computerized guidelines and pathways often become complex and unwieldy to navigate. The user either lacks information because of high-level and simplified overview representations of a guideline or pathway, or is overwhelmed by the complexity of information.